For us non-Americans it is sometimes hard to understand Donald Trump because he speaks and writes in what the British philosopher Bertrand Russell called “little patches of color”—micro-facts that must be pieced together to form a meaningful picture. For me, an economist from South America who works around the world making capitalism more inclusive and trying to adapt blockchain technology to that purpose, the picture Mr. Trump seems to be painting is that the American people and economy are being held back by elites who obtain privileges in a corrupt government that is mismanaging globalization and immigration, while failing to contain terrorism.

LIMA – Colombian governments have been fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the past 52 years, with no victory in sight. In early October, a razor-thin majority of voters rejected Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s proposed peace deal with the guerrillas.Compare Colombia’s experience with that of Peru, which defeated its own guerrilla movement, the Shining Path, in less than a dozen years, from 1980 to 1992, with more than 85% popular support. Peru was able to achieve a lasting peace for two reasons.

LIMA – Nowadays, globalization’s opponents seem increasingly to be drowning out its defenders. If they get their way, the post-World War II international order – which aimed, often successfully, to advance peace and prosperity through exchange and connection – could well collapse. Can globalization be saved? At first glance, the outlook appears grim. Every aspect of globalization – free trade, free movement of capital, and international migration – is under attack. Leading the charge are antagonistic forces – from populist political parties to separatist groups to terrorist organizations – whose actions tend to focus more on what they oppose than on what they support.

Pope Francis’ visit to Mexico last week took an unexpected turn when he singled out Donald Trump, telling reporters that there are people in the U.S. who have no right to be there and anybody who wants to build borders “is not Christian.” The public spat over immigration made news, with Trump saying the U.S. has the right to close its borders and refuse documentation of the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. To this effect, as Trump said, the Pope just “doesn’t understand” America’s problems.

LIMA – On February 17, Pope Francis is scheduled to celebrate Mass in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just south of the border with the United States. He will surely take that opportunity to urge support for the poor in Mexico and for those who have migrated north.After all, that is what he did in September during his moving homily in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Referring to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, he asked his listeners to reach out to “all those people who don’t appear to belong, or are second-class citizens…because they have no right to be there.

It’s been 14 years since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror.” Today, after spending $1.6 trillion on that war and killing 101 terrorist chieftains, from Osama bin Laden to “Jihadi John,” the West remains just as vulnerable, if not more so, to extremists who can recruit fighters and strike any Western capital virtually at will. Now that another president – François Hollande of France – has also declared war on terror (as have other European leaders), are the prospects for victory really any better? I have my doubts.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has attracted worldwide attention not because he crusades against inequality — many of us do that — but because of its central thesis, based on his reading of the 19th and 20th centuries: that capital “mechanically produces arbitrary, unsustainable inequalities” inevitably leading the world to misery, violence and wars and will continue to do so in this century. So far, Piketty’s critics have offered only technical objections to his number crunching without contesting his apocalyptic political thesis, which is clearly wrong. I know this because over the last years my teams conducted research in the field exploring countries where misery, violence and wars are rampant in the 21st century. What we discovered was that most people actually want more rather than less capital, and they want their capital to be real and not fictitious.

As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers—which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.

But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.